


hey love, you forgot your gloves.

by wishforwishes



Series: veronica and madame george at high tea [1]
Category: Harry Styles (Musician), One Direction (Band)
Genre: Bottom Harry, Character Study, Cissexism, Dirty Talk, F/M, Fingerfucking, Gender Identity, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Lingerie, M/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Phone Sex, Polyamory Negotiations, Sharing Clothes, overuse of the word "bloomers", pretentious internal monologues, very poor self-reflection skills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-07 12:00:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19208989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishforwishes/pseuds/wishforwishes
Summary: "I don't remember the toast, but I remember the feeling."Harry works a few things out.





	hey love, you forgot your gloves.

**Author's Note:**

> To be honest, writing this fic was a thinly veiled excuse to project my complicated relationship with femininity onto everyone’s favorite gender-free blank slate Harry Styles. Hopefully the results prove entertaining to even one other person on Earth. Eternal thanks to [Sarah](http://www.hitchfender.tumblr.com/) for the britpick and some much-needed advice and to [Liz](http://www.harryseyebrows.tumblr.com/) for beta'ing this fic and being the loveliest cheerleader for months while I got my shit together for long enough to finish it. You're my heroes. 
> 
> (obligatory disclaimer that all of this is fiction and i'm not implying anything about the actual personal lives of any people featured.)
> 
> (title taken from "Madame George" by Van Morrison)

**i. dress**

There was one night in Jamaica, towards the end of Harry’s stay there, that the whole team got properly soused. Everyone started making wild bets and wagering their possessions as collateral. The crew’s creative director, Molly, ended up in one of Harry’s Hawaiian shirts, and Harry ended up in her dress. His mind’s still fuzzy on the details of that trade, or who lost which bet, or even what the dress looked like.

According to everyone else, he spent the night spinning dramatically in the sand and making toasts to everyone he saw. He doesn’t remember any of that either. What he _does_ remember is a manic, giddy high coursing through him as the dress swished over his legs on the beach. And he can recall the feeling that must have inspired that revelry: a swelling rush of gratitude, bursting from a wellspring that, in the hungover light of day, had no apparent source.

It’s his happiest memory from a very happy couple of weeks, and he doesn't even remember enough of the night to know why. But the sense of gratitude has stayed with him.

It’s a feeling that’s grown especially strong now that tour has started, and he’s getting to spend most nights on stage with his band. He’s known Adam for years; he watched him become a father twice over, but between his adorable kids and Harry’s busy schedule, he can’t say they were ever particularly close. Harry’s enjoying getting to know him better now that they’re working together. Clare and Sarah are, by comparison, much newer presences in his life, though they’ve folded in perfectly like they were always meant to be there.

But the one constant, from the earliest stages of the album’s production, has been Mitch. He’s followed Harry everywhere since they met, with a casual but unflinching loyalty that Harry doesn’t know how he earned.

Mitch just _gets it_. Harry’s vision for the album, for himself as an artist, for everything he wants to accomplish now that he’s actually, by some trick of fate, getting to make his own music. All the songs that end up making the tracklist (and more than a few that they hold onto for later) only exist because of Mitch. They’re a match made in musical heaven.

So Harry feels like he can’t be blamed for thinking that maybe, that steady partnership has the potential for something more. He’s a romantic — to a fault, as it turns out, because Sarah and Mitch start dating almost as soon as they meet.

Harry’s happy for them, but he’s only human, so he’s a little bitter too. Especially because Sarah seems to want to “repay” him for setting her and Mitch up by trying to push him and Clare together too. He can’t exactly tell her that he’s not interested because he’s still nursing a crush on her boyfriend, so she keeps pushing.

Some awkwardness has been lingering in the air lately as a result. But at the end of the day, Harry still feels more grateful than anything else. He reaches back for that feeling from that night in Jamaica whenever he can, nurturing it and letting it grow until it covers any feelings of resentment he might have too.

It’s more a thought exercise than a memory at this point, which is why Harry is so thrown off when someone besides him brings it up.

Harry, Sarah, and Mitch are backstage at Boston’s Wang Theatre, killing time until they have to start getting ready to go on. Sarah’s been angling for Harry and Clare to go out and explore the city’s nightlife together after the show. He’s trying to rebuff her suggestions, fumbling his attempts a bit in embarrassment, because Sarah doesn’t normally bring up her matchmaking scheme in front of Mitch.

He’s half-tempted to actually go along with her suggestions for once, just to see if it would get a reaction from Mitch. He doesn’t even know what he would do if it worked, but still.

When Mitch does finally join the conversation, though, it’s only to make fun of Harry for being embarrassed.

“I haven’t seen your face this red since that one time we were all drunk off our asses in Jamaica,” Mitch teases. Predictably, that only makes Harry blush more.   

“Don't know what you're talking about. We were beacons of sobriety and responsibility in Jamaica,” Harry says, trying to inject as much cloying earnestness into his tone as possible.

“Really? You don't remember Jeff puking all over my guitar? Or you stealing a dress from someone?” Mitch presses. Sarah’s eyes light up. Harry pauses, a little wrongfooted by the reference and her reaction.

“Stealing as in wearing? You wore a dress?” she asks, sounding delighted.

“Um, yeah,” Harry says, “just because it seemed like a funny thing to do at the time. I don’t really remember-”

“What kind of dress?” Sarah asks, cutting him off, and great, he can already tell she’s not going to let it go.

“Well, I wasn’t really paying attention to what it looked like,” Harry hedges, trying in vain to deflect, but Sarah’s not having it. She strides over to where their outfits for the evening are hanging up and holds up the flowy dress Clare set out to wear earlier: long and purple with floral patterns.

“I want to see what you look like in one. I bet you’ll be so cute,” Sarah says in a sing-song voice. Harry eyes the dress doubtfully.

“I don’t think it’d fit me properly, the way it fits Clare,” Harry protests, making a crude cupping gesture with his hands and then immediately cringing at himself. Sarah doesn’t seem very impressed with this argument, saying only, “Well, obviously no dress is going to fit you properly. You’re not a girl, are you? I still want to see,” before throwing the dress at him.

She’s right, obviously — the dress in Jamaica probably looked ridiculous too. Harry’s not sure why her statement stings so much. Maybe he’s getting too vain? He makes a note to himself, as he shrugs his clothes off, to do some meditating about whether he needs to work on his modesty. Probably so. Mitch starts spluttering by the time Harry gets his boxers off, but Sarah doesn’t react beyond an annoyed eye roll. Well, she wanted it like Jamaica, and he’s pretty sure he was starkers under the dress then too, so.

He pulls Clare’s dress over his head, and does his best to adjust the sleeves once it’s on, but there’s no hope for the buttons in the front. His shoulders are too broad to do up the top half of them, and the bottom half just bunch together weirdly when he tries to pull them closed over his fairly flat chest. Still, he does a little turn for Sarah’s benefit, and as he does, some sense memory rises up from the back of his brain: twirling around the beach outside the Cocosan villa, kicking up sand and laughing as his dress spun around him. As Sarah starts clapping and telling him how good he looks, Harry feels a bit of that same high return too: a buzzy gratitude, warm and self-assured.

His reminiscing and Sarah’s compliments distract him enough that he stops paying attention to the time. He’s still posturing in the dress when Harry Lambert and Clare join the rest of them in the dressing room. But before he can apologise (or blame Sarah), Lambert whips out a Polaroid and starts snapping pictures of him, and Clare encourages him to pose a bit, saying he looks better in her clothes than she does. It’s not true, of course. But it warms him inside all the same.

Once Lambert’s got a few good photos, Clare asks for her dress back. Harry mock-protests her request — “You told me I looked good in it, so I was thinking of wearing it on stage tonight, actually.”

“Ha ha,” Clare says sarcastically. “You have your own outfit for the night, H, now gimme.” She stretches her hands out expectantly. But Harry just looks at her, feeling a hesitance rise up inside him, which doesn't make sense. Because it’s just a joke, right? They’re all just having fun, taking the piss out of him for how silly he looks — pretending he can actually pull this kind of look off.

So he tells Clare, “No, I think it’d be cool if we just switched clothes for the night. I’m sure you can play in my suit if you roll the sleeves up a bit.”

Then he shoots her a grin and tears out of the dressing room, the dress billowing behind him as he runs down the hallway.

As Clare shouts gleefully and chases after him, he thinks about the fact that her objection is just that he’s stolen _her_ dress, specifically. If he _actually_ wanted to wear a dress onstage at some point, she probably wouldn’t even blink; he doesn’t think anyone in the band or anyone from his team of stylists would.

The thing is, Harry remembers a time when he wouldn’t have been able to say that truthfully. He remembers Lou Teasdale scrubbing varnish off his nails and gloss from his lips before 1D shows, so he wouldn’t “clash with the rest of the boys”. He remembers Louis vetoing half of Harry’s fashion decisions for years, paranoid that it would stir up old rumours, until Harry finally stopped listening to him.

But it took him so long to be comfortable with bright patterns or a bit of makeup. The extremes of dresses and skirts were way too much of a headache to even think about.

So he hadn’t thought about it. Unless it was for a laugh. And even then, well. If the idea of playing into the “bloke in a dress” gag made his stomach swirl with nausea, that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It was just a joke, after all.

He played it off as a joke in Jamaica. But he remembers, now, spending the rest of that night in Molly’s dress, dancing on the beach with an unusually loose-limbed Mitch, Jeff watching them with that same delight he always seemed to have when Harry was hamming it up for an audience. The both of them, and the whole writing team besides, offering their unconditional acceptance so casually that he didn’t even think about it at the time.

So. Maybe that feeling of gratitude was a little more complicated than he’d first thought. Harry slows down from a sprint to a jog in the hallway as he thinks it over.

Clare doesn’t seem to notice his change in speed. When she catches up she barrels into him and knocks him off his feet. He tries to keep them both from falling by wrapping one arm around her and grabbing at the nearest solid object with his free hand. But that object turns out to be a doorknob, which gives way almost immediately. Harry has a split second to make peace with his fate, and then they’re both falling backwards through the doorway, crashing to the floor of what seems like an empty storage room.  

Luckily, Harry hits the ground first, and Clare lands safely on top of him. She scrambles up immediately, pulling him up with her and trying to apologise, but she’s laughing too hard to get any real words out.

“Are you going to give me my clothes back now?” she manages to ask after a minute, still shaking with laughter.  

“That’s why you want the dress back? Because it’s yours?” Harry asks, angling for a confirmation of his earlier thoughts but aware that he’s not really making sense. Sure enough, Clare wrinkles her nose a little, clearly confused.

“Well, yeah, I can’t exactly go out there tonight in sweats and a dressing gown,” she reasons, gesturing at herself as she does.

Harry could clarify what he means, but the surety he had that her response would be positive is fading, being replaced with that old instinct to shrug it off. God, he’s so fucking frustrated with himself sometimes. It’s like he can do all the self-examining in the world, but never about this.

So he just shakes his head and says, “Never mind,” pulling the dress quickly over his head and then holding it out to her.  

Clare draws in a sharp breath as he does, her eyes going wide. Harry pauses in confusion for a second, and then looks down at himself and freezes.

At some point, he’d managed to forget that he wasn’t wearing anything under the dress. He quickly gathers it up against his torso, trying to cover himself at least a bit, but the apology he tries to make sticks in his throat. Because Clare doesn’t look mortified. She still seems a bit surprised, but her gaze is also calculating in a way that cuts straight through him, making him feel exposed in a way that has nothing to do with his state of undress.

Harry somehow hadn’t considered, in all the time that Sarah has been trying to push him towards Clare, whether she’d tried to push Clare towards him too; whether Clare might have started to consider him in a certain light as a result. After all, _she’s_ not hung up on anyone else.

After too long a moment, Clare seems to realizes she’s still staring at him, and she snaps her head to the side, blushing. But she doesn’t make any apologies. It stays dead silent between them.

If Harry had even the slightest bit of sense, he’d put the dress back on and break that silence by saying they should head back to get changed. But. Despite the fact that he’s still jumbled up inside over Mitch. And despite the fact that he’s spent a lot of time ignoring Sarah’s attempts at playing cupid. And despite the fact that the fucking door into this room is still open, what comes out of his mouth is,

“You uh. You don’t have to look away.” Clare’s blush deepens, but she keeps her gaze averted, and after a second she says,

“I just don’t want to make you uncomfortable or anything.”

“I’m the one who just got naked in front of you. I kind of feel like that should be my line,” Harry replies, and they both laugh a little at that, the tension breaking.

“I mean. You spend a _lot_ of time undressed, so we’re all used to it by now,” Clare says. She hesitates for a second, then continues, managing to say, “It’s. I don’t think it’s fair to you if I’m —” before she cuts herself off. Harry waits, but the rest of her sentence doesn’t seem forthcoming. And she’s still looking off to the side.

So Harry moves to the side too, so she’s facing him again, but he keeps himself about a metre away, still holding the dress against his body. She blushes even more as he moves, but her eyes darken too, and they flick up and down a few times before settling on his face.

“If what?” he asks, heart beating fast. He’s not sure why he’s pressing this now or why it feels almost urgent.

Clare exhales loudly, seeming both embarrassed and exasperated. And then finally —

“It’s not fair to you if I’m getting something from it. It’s clear that you’re just really comfortable with your body, and comfortable around us. And I feel like it’s selfish if I’m, like, taking advantage of that trust, by being. Um. Interested.”

She says it all in a rush, her brogue getting stronger by the second in her embarrassment, and it takes Harry a second to decipher her words.

Once he has, he almost wants to start laughing again. This whole situation has only reminded him how _un_ comfortable he is with his body sometimes. He tries to think of what to say to her, but it’s hard, when he can’t even describe it to himself.

“Well, maybe I’m selfish too,” he manages to respond. It takes him even longer than normal to get the words out, but Clare just listens patiently.

“I like that you wanted to look at me. I mean, I was just in front of you, wearing a dress, a second ago. And yet you’re still telling me that you’re interested in me. So I like the thought that maybe I could have —”

He stops, unable to continue, but they can both hear the rest: _maybe I could have kept wearing it, and you still would have been interested_. And he doesn't know why that matters so much: why that’s enough to keep him rooted in front of her, hands stiffly clenched on the hem of the dress. Clare doesn't question the way that he's frozen. She doesn’t ask him to finish what he was saying.

Instead, she tentatively reaches out, sliding her fingers between his and loosening his hold on the dress, until it slides out of his grip and to the floor. Just like that, he's completely naked in front of her. Except for his black socks, some distant part of him notes a little hysterically. He feels like he should make some effort to cover himself now that the dress isn’t an option, but they just keep staring at each other instead.

After a few moments, Clare guides his hand to her chest. She rests it over her heart, which he can feel beating a little faster than is probably normal.

Watching her face carefully, Harry spreads his hand out underneath hers, the tips of his fingers slipping under the open collar of her robe. Clare’s eyes flutter closed for a moment, and she adjusts his hand so he’s cupping the swell of her breast instead.

Harry finds his voice. “This is why I didn’t button the dress up. The top would have gapped all weird, because I can't fill it out like you can.” He’s aiming for a playful tone, but his words come out wistful. Clare makes a sympathetic noise before reaching out to place both her hands over his chest in turn, pushing his pecs up and together until they look a little bit like cleavage.

“What do you mean? If you got a bra with some proper support, you'd look even lovelier than you already do,” Clare says, voice small but steady.

Of course, that’s the moment that Sarah finally finds them. She pauses for a moment after walking in the room, probably trying to process what she’s seeing — Harry buck arse naked, both he and Clare fondling each other’s chests, the dress a puddle on the floor.

“Hmm. Well,” Sarah starts, her expression blank with surprise. She pauses again, visibly gathering herself, and manages to affect a passable disinterest when she says, “Lambert wants us all changed so he can get a group picture.”

Then she backs out of the room as quickly as she came in. Harry and Clare gape for a second at each other, and then finally manage to jump apart. Harry pulls the dress back on, shame flooding through him. When they finally get back to the main dressing room, neither of them can look the rest of the band or each other in the eye. It takes a couple of weeks before Harry can even talk to Clare again without going red. Even once he can, they don’t speak about anything unrelated to music or the tour. Sarah must sense the tension too, because she stops her matchmaking efforts.

As the shows wear on, Harry tries to avoid remembering everything he felt in Boston, and that night in Jamaica too. There’s no point in dwelling on it. He’s already found his niche as the guy who can manage to look sharp in wacky, colourful suits — he doesn’t need to branch out to dresses. Why would he even want to? Better that he doesn’t think about it anymore.

* * *

**ii. socks**

He doesn’t think about it anymore, but if he did, then why isn’t he happy right now? If he really is the type of guy that likes wearing dresses, he should be nothing but thrilled about Lambert ordering kilts for the whole band to wear for the Glasgow arena show.

Harry _is_ excited at first, just because he always enjoys engaging with the fashion traditions of the countries he visits (he has a beaded look planned for Mexico City that he can’t wait to wear). But once Lambert gets into the details of what everyone will be wearing in Glasgow, Harry’s mood plummets.

Clare and Sarah’s looks are identical: short kilted skirts with a red tartan pattern and matching hats, along with knee-length white socks. Harry, Mitch, and Adam, on the other hand, are all given a black kilt of a traditional longer length, and matching black sporrans and socks.  

“It feels a bit off-balance, to be honest,” Harry finds himself saying to Lambert during the band’s first fitting for the kilts. Sarah, Clare, and Mitch are all goofing off and taking pictures of each other. Adam is facetiming with his wife, and she’s crooning about how dashing he looks. Harry finds that he just can’t handle it all of a sudden.

“Shouldn’t our outfits coordinate a bit more?” he presses, and Lambert shoots him a confused look.

“This is the most coordinated you’re going to be all tour,” he points out. “You’re literally all wearing kilts.”

“Right,” Harry says. He should probably leave it at that, but he can’t help adding, “But Clare and Sarah’s are a lot different from the rest of ours.”

“Well, yeah, Sue, of course they are,” Lambert teases, using the old nickname to soften the mood, because Harry’s probably not being subtle about how much this is bothering him.

“The kilts are traditional _male_ dress in Scotland, so we had to find an alternative for Clare and Sarah that was a little more girly.”

It takes every bit of media training Harry’s acquired in the last seven years not to noticeably react to Lambert’s words. He smiles tightly at him instead, mumbles something along the lines of “fair enough” and lets it go. He heads over to where everyone else is taking pictures, trying to find a distraction from the disappointment coursing through him.

He finds that distraction in Clare, who won’t stop staring at him for the rest of the fitting. Things are still awkward between them, and they’ve been all but avoiding each other since the prep for the arena shows has started. But now she’s looking at him in that same calculating way she did in Boston. Harry figures she overheard his conversation with Lambert and has caught on to why he might be bothered. He’s relieved that she sticks just to staring, though, and doesn’t try to call him out about it in front of everyone.

As it turns out, though, Clare was just biding her time.

Several weeks later, when they’ve all arrived at the Hydro arena in Glasgow, Hélène cajoles them into getting into their kilts a few hours early for a group picture. Afterwards, Harry heads out in search of an appropriately funny prop to stick in his sporran. He and Mitch are in his dressing room, cackling over the banana he’s decided on, when Clare bursts in on them.

With unexpected precision, she lobs something straight at Harry’s face; he grabs it instinctively before it can hit him. Once he notices what he’s holding, he shoots Clare a confused look.

“Is there a reason you’re throwing your socks at me?” he asks her, though he’s not really sure he wants to know the answer.

“I told Lambert a few days ago that I laddered mine, and he sent me a new pair,” Clare explains.

“Well, then you need these back, obviously,” Harry counters, holding them out to her. She snatches them back from him, but then just tosses them to Mitch instead. He neatly catches them, a bemused look on his face.

“ _Obviously_ ,” Clare parrots in a passable imitation of Harry's accent, “I didn't actually muck up the first pair. I figured this way you'd be able to match with Sarah and me a little more, like you wanted, yeah?”

She doesn't wait for a response before zipping out of the dressing room, slamming the door behind her. Which is probably a good thing. Harry doesn't think he'd be capable of a response right now.

He’s been staring at the closed door blankly for at least a few seconds, completely dumbstruck, when he hears Mitch ask,

“Um. So, what does she want us to do with these?”

Goddamn Clare, Harry thinks, mind spiraling instantly into panic mode. She finally decides to (sort of) talk to him about … things … and she has to do it front of Mitch?

“It’s really not a big deal,” Harry says. “I just mentioned something about my outfit not matching the other day, and I guess Clare remembered.”

“Huh. Well, I don’t know anything about fashion, but wouldn’t black socks kind of automatically match your kilt more than white ones?” Mitch asks, holding up the socks in question.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Harry starts, before remembering that he’s supposed to be deflecting. He snaps his mouth closed, and gives Mitch the same smile and ‘never mind’ that he applied to Lambert when the issue first came up.

However, Mitch just keeps looking at him, clearly waiting on him to elaborate, and after a few moments Harry gives up, throwing himself down in the nearest chair in a huff.  

“Look,” he says, staring down at his lap glumly and playing with the clasp on his sporran, “I just thought it might make more sense, like, stylistically, if my outfit matched with Clare and Sarah too, not just you and Adam. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need new socks. You can just set them down somewhere and I’ll get them back to Clare later. It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah, that’s the second time you’ve said that,” Mitch replies. There’s an odd note in his voice, and it makes Harry jerk his head up. Mitch’s eyes have gone a little out of focus, the way they sometimes would in Jamaica when a new piece of the song they were working on had just clicked into his head.

“That’s the second time I’ve said what?” Harry asks, trying to shake him out of whatever epiphany he thinks he’s having about a pair of fucking socks.  

“The second time you’ve said it’s not a big deal,” Mitch says after a second, gaze sharp again and zeroed in on Harry speculatively. “So it’s also not a big deal to change them now, right?”

“We’re already dressed,” Harry points out, his voice rising at the end like it’s a question instead of an observation.

“What, you’re gonna compromise your creative vision just to avoid a costume change? That doesn’t sound like the Harry Styles I know. And anyway, we’ve got plenty of time. Here, I’ll put them on for you.”

And with that, Mitch walks over to where Harry’s sitting and _bloody_ _kneels on the floor in front of him_. Harry chokes on air. This situation is rapidly starting to resemble the fantasies he forced himself to stop indulging in once Mitch and Sarah started dating.

“What are you — get back up, Mitch, I'm good, seriously,” Harry protests, tripping over his words. He starts to stand up, but then Mitch reaches out and gently circles his left hand around Harry’s right ankle, holding his foot in place. Harry watches, heart beating wildly in his chest, as Mitch hooks the fingers of his right hand just slightly underneath the tongue of his shoe.

Then he looks up at Harry and pauses his movements, keeping his hands where they are. Harry's own hands twist together on his lap nervously. God, what are they playing at, here? It’s like Harry trying not to make a fuss about the socks _caused_ a fuss. And now Mitch wants to assuage him by playing Prince Charming to his Cinderella, apparently. Harry’s probably coming off like some unmanageable diva.

If he’s honest with himself, what he’s really upset about is having become so transparent about this part of him, after keeping it under wraps for so long. But before he can really start berating himself, Mitch gives him a small, reassuring smile and strokes his thumb over the little metal bee decorating the top of Harry’s shoe.

 _Jamaica_ , Harry tells himself. _Mitch danced with you in Jamaica._

So he takes a deep breath, swallows his nervousness, and nods. Mitch immediately looks back down and resumes his movement, pulling Harry’s shoe off. Once it’s out of the way, Mitch grasps Harry’s foot by the heel, clearly about to yank the sock down over it.

“Stop,” Harry interrupts, and Mitch immediately freezes and looks back up at him.

“You can’t just pull the fabric from the bottom like you’re ripping a bandaid off. You’ll risk the integrity of the shape,” Harry tells him, aiming for a lofty tone of voice and missing it by a mile.

A little smirk creeps onto Mitch's face, but he doesn't actually _say_ that Harry's explanation sounds like bullshit (it is, a bit), so Harry's probably in the clear.

But Mitch doesn't look back down again. He keeps his eyes fixed on Harry as he slides his hands upwards, his touch warming Harry's skin even through the layer separating them.

It seems like a million years before Mitch's hands reach the top of the sock, and once they have, he still doesn't speed up his movements. He curls his fingers into the cuff and starts rolling it down, a little at a time.

“Am I doing it carefully enough now?” Mitch asks, innocent tone of voice belying the smirk still affixed to his face.

Harry can't bring himself to say anything in response; it's hard enough just holding Mitch's gaze. He feels dizzy, like all the blood in his body has rushed to his head.

It's not just that Mitch is touching him. Harry's demonstrative with everyone, and discovered early on in their friendship that Mitch, despite his attempts at stoicism, loves cuddling. So it’s not the touch itself that affects him; it’s the intention Harry can feel behind it.

It's like they're back in Jamaica. They were affectionate with each other even then, but it was never casual or friendly. Every touch felt purposeful: planned out with a nervous expectation that something more would blossom out of it eventually.

Or at least, that was what Harry had hoped.

But then they got back to the States. And then Sarah and Mitch met. And then suddenly Harry’s still-forming place in Mitch’s life had established itself firmly as ‘friend’ — and friend alone.

Whatever energy they’d had fizzled into a steady placidity. Harry tried to be okay with it. The last thing he wanted to do was come off like a possessive jackass, but he couldn’t help wondering — had he just been imagining things the whole time? Constructing some romcom-inspired sexual tension that wasn’t there?

He wasn’t sure which thought hurt his ego more: that Mitch was straight and Harry had just been making a fool out of himself, or that Mitch _had_ been interested, and then had chosen Sarah instead of him.

Either way, Harry had been trying to accept that Mitch had clearly forgotten the way they used to be with each other. Until now.

Now, Mitch lifts Harry’s foot up gently to take his sock the rest of the way off. Then he replaces his hands on Harry’s now-uncovered leg, smoothing up and down, even though he no longer has a reason to do so. It's a slow, deliberate touch, like Mitch is remembering Jamaica too — like he can feel the resurrection of that tension crackling between his fingertips and Harry’s skin.

He digs his fingers into the sensitive skin at the back of Harry's knee, and Harry can't help but let out a small sound, confused and helplessly turned on by this sudden, careful attention.

Maybe Mitch notices that Harry’s a little overwhelmed; maybe he just comes back to his senses and remembers that he has a girlfriend who could walk in on them at any time. Either way, he lets go like he’s been scalded, and switches to Harry’s other leg, removing the second shoe and sock in a more utilitarian manner, looking as close to flustered as Harry’s ever seen him.

With both the socks off, they just sit there in silence for a second. Harry wiggles his toes a little, watching as Mitch picks up the still-folded pair of white socks and twists them in his hands restlessly like he’s trying to distract himself out of touching Harry again.

“So,” Harry says eventually, giving himself a mental pat on the back for finding his voice. “If you’re not gonna put them on for me, hand them over.”

He stretches out a hand expectantly, but needlessly. His words seem to stir Mitch back into action. He unfolds the white socks and efficiently pulls each one up to Harry’s knee, remembering to fold them over at the cuff without being prompted. He even takes Harry’s shoes and slips his feet back into them, like Harry really is some kind of Cinderella.

“Thank you,” Harry says softy when Mitch has finished, and Mitch smiles and nods his head in acknowledgement, but doesn’t say anything, as if he’s now the one who’s been robbed of his voice. He pats Harry’s knee companionably as he gets up, all the tension from the moments before gone.

But over the next couple hours, as they’re all getting ready to go onstage, Harry notices that Mitch keeps rubbing his fingers together absently, like he’s remembering how Harry’s skin felt under his hands.

That possibility is distracting enough that Harry doesn’t notice Clare walking up to him until she taps him on the shoulder. He spins around to look at her, feeling caught out: both by his thoughts and by the fact that she’s initiating conversation so much today, after months of them awkwardly dodging each other.

“Hey,” she says shyly, looking him up and down. Harry assumes she’s going to mention the socks. He’s already preparing a way to downplay the whole situation when she throws him for a loop yet again.

“For the record, it would definitely be betraying my Scottish heritage to refer to a kilt or a sporran in any manner but the traditional one,” she says, face set in deadly serious lines.

“Right,” Harry responds, mystified as to where this is going.

“But my Japanese heritage,” Clare continues, grin breaking across her face like the rising sun, “wants me to tell you that your skirt is really cute. And I like your matching purse too.”

And before he can get worried that she’s mocking him, her smile gentles. She stretches up to kiss him softly on the cheek, then whispers in his ear, “You look good. Seriously.”

She pulls back, winks, and then walks off.

They say nothing more about it, but things feel more settled between them again after that.

And Harry feels settled too. Settled enough to actually have some proper fun sashaying around in the kilt onstage. Enough to shyly ask Hélène after the show if they can redo the group picture so it features his new socks. Enough to keep wearing the kilt the next day, slung low over his hips and under an oversized t-shirt. Enough to tuck the kilt away in his personal bags, separate from the rest of the wardrobe luggage. Just in case. For a rainy day.  

* * *

  **iii. nail varnish**

A handful of the suits are black. Some have a unique cut; some have a nicely-patterned lining. But they’re still black — still understated in a way the rest of the suits he’s selected for the tour are not. Of course, Harry genuinely loves all of the outfits he’s getting the chance to wear. And it’s not like he _minds_ a sharp black suit on occasion. But a few hours before showtime in Brisbane, he finds himself staring at tonight’s Givenchy number and he can’t help but feel a bit like he’s looking into a void.

He pulls his eyes away from where the suit is hanging up innocently on the other side of his dressing room, and looks down at his feet instead, willing himself to walk the maybe twenty steps forward and grab it off its hanger. After a few moments, he manages to make himself start walking, but he veers off to the right at the last second and escapes the suit and his dressing room altogether.

Setting off down the industrial-lit hallways of the venue’s sprawling backstage area, he tries to remember where Clare and Sarah’s dressing room is located. The longer he can bother them, the longer he can put off trying the suit on (and the longer he can avoid thinking about why he doesn’t want to put on a suit that he and Lambert both agreed was perfect).

Luckily, he runs into Sarah before he can get too lost. He sees her eyes light up when she spots him, but they quickly narrow in suspicion. Which is fair, because he has a habit by now of dragging her and Mitch into ping-pong matches backstage when they should be getting dressed or rehearsing. Which. Hmm. That might work, as far as distractions go.

“Sarah,” Harry says, grinning and grabbing her by the elbows. “I think it’s time we had another few matches for our —” Sarah starts groaning on cue, as she does whenever he mentions the tournament, but only puts up a token protest to being dragged down the hallway to where the crew’s set up the ping-pong table. Harry might not be able to remember where his band’s dressing rooms are, but he’s definitely kept track of where the table is each night. Priorities, after all.

Adam’s already there, having a half-hearted friendly with Henry, one of the videographers, but they put down their paddles and give each other commiserating looks when Harry walks in, Sarah in tow. Harry ignores their reaction — it’s hard to find people with a healthy appreciation for competition.

“Right,” Harry says, rubbing his hands together in excitement, “Sarah, I think you and Adam still need to play each other, right? And Henry, I haven’t played you yet, so we can go against each other after their match, and then the winners can play each other!” At that, he walks over to a couch that must have been hastily shoved aside to make room for the table, and flops himself down on it. With some reluctance (which Harry _knows_ is at least 40% for show), Sarah takes the paddle Henry offers her.

They’re only a few serves into the first set when Jake, Lambert’s apprentice and stylist-in-training, walks into the room. He strides immediately over to Harry, who freezes in place on the couch, caught out. Jake stands over him, looking at Harry’s white t-shirt and sweatpants like they’ve personally insulted his family.

“Uh, five more minutes?” Harry questions hopefully, but Jake just sighs and hauls him up off the couch, dragging him away towards the door.

“See how you like being manhandled!” Sarah yells after him gleefully, followed immediately by “Shit!” as Adam uses the distraction to score on her. Harry’s still cackling by the time he and Jake get back to his dressing room.

“We just need to do one more test fitting before the show,” Jake assures him, grabbing the suit and gesturing for Harry to take off his clothes. “Then you can goof off to your heart’s content until we need you all to get dressed.”

“Right,” Harry says flatly, stripping off his shirt and sweatpants quickly and taking the suit from Jake, trying not to show how uncomfortable he is, because he _shouldn’t_ be. Givenchy was kind enough to offer him more than a half-dozen amazing suits for tour, and this is one of the four he chose. He doesn’t know why he’s having this problem now. Giving himself a mental shake, he hastily pulls the trousers up, but before he can grab for the shirt and jacket, Jake makes a noise of distress.

“Shit, the zipper must have busted in an earlier fitting and we didn’t notice.”

Harry feels an immediate sense of relief, but he tries to push it down. “That’s too bad,” he says as casually as he can manage. “Guess I’ll have to wear something else for the night.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jake exclaims. “Mr Lambert will literally teleport here from London to kill me if I let the costume schedule change like that. Don’t worry, I’ll have a fix before showtime.” He says this like he’s trying to reassure Harry, but Harry doesn’t want to let go of his one chance to get out of wearing the suit _and_ save face.

“It’s really fine, I won’t let him give you shit about it,” he says, but Jake’s already shaking his head and gathering up all of Harry’s clothes.

“No, I need to prove to Mr Lambert that he was right to trust me to sub in for him on this leg of the tour. I can do this.” And with that, he strides out of the dressing room, the suit bundled up in his arms — along with the sweatpants and shirt Harry was wearing. Great. So much for getting back to that ping-pong match. He grabs his phone so he can call Ayae and ask her to just start getting him ready for the show early, when he sees a message from Sarah.

**just beat adams ass haha. ok i admit it was pretty fun. come back and beat henry real fast so we can play each other :)**

Harry looks down at himself, reads the message again, and grins.

_im on my way :D_

As Sarah requested, Harry wins his match in record time. Henry stomps to the sidelines, complaining about Harry’s ‘unfair tactic’ of ‘distracting him with his nakedness’.

“That’s your hang-up, man,” Harry says sunnily as Hélène swoops in to snap pictures of his victory.

“Sarah, you’re not gonna let _all this_ distract you, right?” Harry gestures to his naked body suggestively.

Sarah smirks at that and grabs her paddle back from Henry.

“I’d have to be impressed to be distracted, I reckon,” she says, then holds her hand up for a high five from Adam.

“Oh, I see the shit-talking has started already,” Harry says, delighted. But before he can think of something cutting to say in response, Clare walks into the room, saying, “Harry, Jake wants — oh my _god.”_

Clare cuts herself off, eyes going wide as saucers. Harry cringes a little as they stare at each other. He can’t help vividly recalling the last time she saw him naked — _and_ with the same black socks on, even. Damn. Harry shrugs sheepishly at her, trying to cover himself with the paddle a little.

“Sorry, uh, my clothes all got stolen?” he says, raising his voice at the end like he’s offering an excuse he’s not sure she’ll accept. As he’s speaking, Sarah sprints over to where Clare’s still frozen in place and wraps her arms around her mock-protectively.

“How dare you attack my friend’s virtue and innocence with your unclothed form! You’re a fiend, Harry Styles, a fiend!” Sarah exclaims in an overwrought old-timey accent, hanging off Clare dramatically. The tension breaks a bit at that.

Privately, though, Harry can’t help thinking about how Sarah always seems to end up interrupting him and Clare when things get awkward. Maybe it's an attempt to make up for trying so hard to push them together last year.

Clare gently shrugs Sarah off her, laughing a little and looking pointedly away from Harry as she says, “Anyway, Jake sent me to come find you, he said the suit’s fine now and we all need to start getting ready anyway...”

They all file out of the impromptu game room, and that’s the last of the drama until an hour before stage, when Sarah turns to Harry and demands,

“Okay, spill.”

Harry pauses; everyone’s dressed and finished with their pre-performance bonding rituals. Mitch and Adam already left together to check out the last few minutes of Kacey’s set, and Harry was about to go off by himself to meditate the way he normally does until he has to get on stage. He _was_ going to use that time tonight to try to shake off how weird he’s felt about the suit. But now Sarah’s blocking his exit, arms crossed and eyebrows raised.

“Um, about what?” Harry asks, looking over to Clare for assistance, but she’s busying herself by painting her nails and, well, she hasn’t looked directly at him since she walked in on the ping pong match, so she probably won’t be any help.

“You’ve been both more hyper and more gloomy than normal, something’s up,” Sarah insists, walking forward as she talks, so that Harry has to hastily back up to avoid colliding with her. She just keeps coming though, and eventually the backs of his knees hit a chair; Sarah pushes him by the shoulders until he sinks down onto it.

Then Sarah sits down too, facing him and planting her feet on the floor on either side of his legs — basically straddling him and the chair. Harry windmills his arms backwards in panic, attempting to keep their torsos as far apart as possible.

“I’m not gonna get up until you tell me what’s wrong,” Sarah says simply. Harry looks back at Clare wildly, who’s finally looking over at the two of them, but she just nods at Sarah, looking vaguely impressed.

“Well,” Harry says, more than a little irritated at this point, “this might be hard to explain to Mitch if he comes back in.” Sarah just shrugs, and then the two of them are left staring at each other.

Clare sighs and gets up. She probably senses that she needs to intervene, lest they both starve to death trying to out-stubborn each other. She moves over to where they’re both sitting until she’s standing behind the chair and rests her hands on Harry’s shoulders. Something honey-smooth and dark drops through Harry’s stomach at her touch. With a jolt, he realises it’s the first time she’s really touched him since Boston.

Sarah gently grasps his chin and tilts his head back until he's staring up at both of them. They’re looking down at him with nothing but soft understanding on their faces — like they already know what he’s going to say, even if he’s as helplessly unable to explain it as ever.

“It’s the suit,” Harry admits after a moment, settling his hands back on his lap and fidgeting with his rings.

“I loved it when I first tried it on, but after how much — I don't know - _brighter_? Or just how different the other suits have been so far, I just feel … I don't know. I'm being stupid.” He tries to squirm away at that, embarrassed by his slow rambling in a way he rarely is anymore, but Sarah and Clare are holding him too tightly for him to get up.

“Do you feel,” Clare starts, then hesitates, chewing her lip a little. After a second, she starts her sentence over. “Do you not want to wear the suit, in the same way you did want to wear my dress?” If Sarah has any reaction to that revelation, she keeps it under wraps, still just staring down at Harry and holding him firmly in place.

He doesn't know when he stopped feeling trapped and started feeling embraced.

It's that sense of physical closeness — that they clearly already know the answer to the question but are still here, holding him tightly — that makes Harry slowly nod.

“But I don't want to wear a dress onstage either.” _I don't want 20,000 people to see me wearing a dress. Not if they don’t understand that it’s not a joke. Not now._ Harry doesn't articulate the rest of his thoughts but he can tell that they understand. Sarah smiles and clambers off him, heading over to where Clare was painting her nails and scooping up a bottle of light pink varnish off the vanity.

“Clare was borrowing this from me, actually,” Sarah says, walking back over to them and holding the bottle up so he can see. “She left most of her bottles back in the UK by accident.”

“And Sarah has been a savior, letting me mooch off her for the last few shows,” Clare says, finally letting go of Harry’s shoulders and moving over to Sarah to hug her instead. Then they both just stare at him patiently, until he finally asks, “So I could … borrow it too, maybe?”

At that, they both grin and move forward as one, hauling him up from the chair and hustling him over to the vanity. As they start fussing over his nails, Sarah hugs him close and whispers in his ear, “This way you'll always have a way to look pretty, no matter what clothes you're wearing.”  

He's obsessed with Sarah’s varnish for a little while after that. He keeps the light pink bottle (which is called ‘spring blush’, apparently) and re-applies it to his nails for the Manila show too; Harris Reed texts Harry afterwards, both to thank him again for wearing one of their designs, and to compliment him on his colour coordination.

But the shade clashes with the gold YSL blouse he’s meant to wear for Singapore, so he works up the courage to ask Sarah for an alternative. She happily picks out an opalescent varnish for him that goes perfectly with all of his outfits for the rest of the shows in Asia.

It’s only a week after that that he goes back to the same plain black varnish he wore for the UK shows. He lets it slowly chip off until his nails are completely unpainted again. The queasy feeling that had sat in his stomach at the sight of that black Givenchy suit doesn’t make a reappearance, even when he thinks about the sleek black suits from Calvin Klein and Gucci he’s planning on wearing later on in the tour.

He’s not sure why, but he reckons it might have something to do with Clare and Sarah’s new pre-show routine of using his dressing room to do each other’s nails. Ostensibly, it's so they can ask for his opinion on the colour.  But really, Harry thinks, it’s a reminder that he’s grateful for. At a moment’s notice, they’ll be able to make him feel — even if in a small way — pretty again.

* * *

  **iv. interlude**

By the time they get to America, the three of them are very free with each other’s clothes and makeup. Harry lets Clare apply shiny pink glosses to his lips before shows, though he uses tissues to blot the colour into something more subtle every time.

Sarah constantly steals his shirts, claiming the flowy material of the sleeves and bows adds a certain flair to her drumming performance. He calls her out on it when they’re onstage in Minneapolis — a night she’s wearing a white silk blouse he _knows_ he’s already paired with a few Gucci suits. She just grins and waves to the crowd, remorseless as ever.

Clare continues to borrow Sarah’s nail varnish, and sometimes Harry catches her braiding her hair with the fraying rainbow ties he’s been using for years.

He’s glad that they’ve all managed to become so close again — glad that the awkwardness from last year seems to be gone for good. But it makes him even happier to think about where that closeness is rooted: Clare and Sarah are sharing physical pieces of their womanhood with him. Little by little, they’re introducing him to the rituals they each have for bringing their innate sense of femininity to the surface.

A lot of the designers Harry’s worked with recently like to play up the ways that gender is a performance, in a sense, and how clothing can be used to celebrate or subvert it. He’s just now worked out that he was hiding behind that idea of “performance”. It was an excuse to treat his femininity as something superficial — something he could throw around on stage, but never acknowledge as a part of his soul.

For so long, it had felt like that more honest version of reality was trapped on the other side of a vast ocean: some abstract future he hadn’t bothered trying to picture, because he’d known it was impossible to reach. Now, on good days, that future feels like an island in the distance, one he’s swimming closer to every day, the shape of the land slowly revealing itself along the horizon.

Clare and Sarah are keeping him afloat as he goes, bringing the three of them closer than ever. But Mitch is getting farther away.

He was so gentle with Harry in Glasgow, as if he’d known exactly what he needed. Now it seems like that little bit of progress triggered a major regression. He flirts with Harry onstage more than ever, but offstage, he avoids Harry so often, it’s like he’s re-enacting the way Clare and Harry used to dodge each other constantly last year.

It leaves a sour taste in Harry’s mouth, because it feels too similar to how things started to get, years ago, with his _last_ band. Louis was probably Harry’s best friend in the whole world at one point. But after all the ‘Larry’ theories started to spiral out of control, they started to withdraw from each other. Eventually, Louis got to the point of being uncomfortable whenever Harry showed an interest in ‘girly things.’ It was allegedly only because he was worried about it fueling that conspiracy. Still, it had felt like Louis was uncomfortable with _him_. Like Harry had to choose between a friendship with Louis, or being more true to himself.

Nowadays, Mitch is Harry’s closest friend. And he’s used to putting Mitch into the category of people who encourage him to embrace himself. He doesn’t know what could have changed.

Sarah has assured him that it doesn’t have anything to do with their wardrobe-sharing hobby, but she’s otherwise tight-lipped. So there obviously _is_ some kind of problem; she just clearly doesn’t want to betray her boyfriend’s confidence.

Harry wants to believe her, but he mostly doesn’t know what to think about it. And he doesn’t want to pry, because he understands that it’s not fair of him to poke about in their private affairs.

And that reminder hurts too, maybe even more than Mitch’s discomfort does: the fact that at the end of the day, Mitch and Sarah’s relationship is none of his business.

That all changes the night the tour ends. Well, technically, it changes in the wee hours of the morning the following day. Harry’s still lingering at the Forum, trying to find reasons to put off going back to his home in Los Angeles.

He’s already helped the crew pack everything up (or at least he _tried_ , but mostly just succeeded in hovering unhelpfully). He’s traded his sweat-soaked Gucci suit for a more comfortable lounging outfit. He's dutifully posed for pictures with Hélène and several others. He’s also said a tearful goodbye to his band, all of whom he thought had been back at their hotels for hours by now. But as he’s going through his post-show ritual of packing up all his knicknacks, trying not to tear up about the fact that he's doing it for the last time, Sarah crashes his pity parade. She strolls into his dressing room, firmly shutting and locking the door behind her.

“Oh, good, you’re still here. Help me settle an argument with Clare,” she says, in lieu of an actual greeting. Then, before Harry can reply, she starts shucking her clothes off in the middle of the room.

“Wait. What’s happening?” Harry asks, thoughts immediately grinding to a halt.

“Hold on a second,” she says, unbuckling her belt as she does.

“Hold on a second?” Harry repeats, voice going up at least an octave in indignation. “What are you _doing?”_

She doesn’t respond. After a second of blinking slowly at her, his sleep-deprived brain trying to catch up with reality, Harry averts his gaze and turns back to the room’s vanity dresser. He still has to finish packing his bags, despite this interruption, and he wants to be able to claim as much innocence as possible later, if Mitch finds out about...whatever it is that’s happening right now.

“There,” Sarah says with satisfaction after a few more seconds. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry sees her kicking her trousers away and spreading out her arms.

“Is this payback for the naked ping-pong match?” Harry manages weakly, trying in vain to distract himself by refolding a t-shirt.

“Of course not,” Sarah scoffs, “because I'm not naked, am I? That would sort of invalidate the question, wouldn't it?”

“What question?” Harry asks, still feeling like he’s utterly lost the plot.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Like I said, it's an argument I'm having with Clare. Do you think my knickers are boring?”

Harry’s fingers stop working at that, and the shirt falls out of his hands and onto the floor.

“Why — why would you be talking about that with Clare? Why do you want to talk about that with _me_?”.  His face is probably bright red, but he still keeps it determinedly turned away from Sarah.

“Why’re you suddenly acting like some scandalized Victorian? We’ve been sharing this kind of stuff for months now,” Sarah points out, actually sounding a little hurt.

“Well, I’m so sorry that I didn’t realise bloody lingerie was on that list of stuff!” Harry says exasperatedly, his voice still a little high pitched.

And it _is_ lingerie, not just underwear. Harry’s still not looking at Sarah, but he can see her a bit through the vanity’s mirror. He should look away from that too; in fact, he should probably abandon his belongings and flee back to his hotel right now. But he’s distracted, suddenly, when he notices that what Sarah’s wearing does seem a little different than the lingerie he’s seen some of his girlfriends (and, once, Nick Grimshaw) wear in the past.

Instead of the high-cut, lacy knickers that Harry is used to seeing, Sarah is wearing loose-fitting shorts that come down to mid-thigh. Bloomers, Harry's mind supplies, before it goes back to screaming at him to look away.

He doesn’t, though; he keeps looking, trying to focus only on the details of the bloomers themselves, rather than Sarah’s body.   

The shorts are mostly a transparent material — some sort of chiffon, it seems — and coloured a nice soft blue, but there are sprawling silver flowers layered over it, providing an opaqueness.

She has on a matching bra as well, although there are less flowers on it, and Sarah’s breasts are clearly visible through the sheer fabric. _So much for avoiding looking at her body_ , Harry thinks, defeated, and finally lifts his gaze to her face.

“I really don’t understand what’s going on, Sarah,” he says, thankful that his voice sounds mostly calm again.

She sighs, and walks over to the vanity, where Harry’s still standing awkwardly by his bags. He skitters backwards a bit as she does, but she doesn’t try to touch him. She just shoves the bags to the floor and then hauls herself up until she’s sitting, legs crossed, where they were resting.

“Okay,” she says, clearly settling in for a long explanation, “So Mitch went back to our hotel before me, and I wanted to put on something special for him. You know, to surprise him. End of tour, and all that.

“But when I asked for Clare’s advice about how I looked, she said I should wear something a bit sexier and more modern if I _really_ wanted to surprise him. But I think these are plenty sexy! Just because they’re a little older, and not just one scrap of fabric giving me a wedgie on both sides, doesn’t mean they’re not sexy.”

Sarah sounds like she’s lecturing Harry at this point too, even though he still hasn’t given his opinion. Which he guesses is what she wants. But then —

“Why are you asking me, and not Hélène or Ayae?” He’s half-expecting her to say she wants a man’s opinion on the matter. He’s already preparing himself for how much that would hurt. But instead she just looks at him like he’s crazy.

“Like I said, I thought that you and me and Clare shared everything at this point. You’re basically one of the girls in my eyes,” Sarah says, shrugging. Her eyes go wide a second later. “Is that offensive, that I think that? Shit, I’m sorry.”

Her words hit Harry’s body like a sudden ray of sunlight, warming him all the way to his bones. “No,” he says softly. “It’s not offensive.”  

Okay, so maybe Harry can do this. He takes a minute to fully take in how Sarah looks, cataloguing how the blue fabric matches her eyes, how the shorts manage to maintain an illusion of modesty despite their sheerness, how she seems completely comfortable wearing them.

“I think it’s lovely,” Harry says finally. “It’s way more ‘you’ than other lingerie would be. And I mean, it’s you that Mitch likes, so, I figure he’ll appreciate it more than you trying to uh. Be someone else.”

“Wow, that’s very profound, Styles,” Sarah teases. “Did you get that from a Nancy Meyers movie?”

“She’s one of the greatest filmmakers of our time,” he says in mock-annoyance. They’re both grinning at each other at this point, returned to their easy camaraderie.

“Well, she’s alright, I guess. Her style is just a bit too modern for me. I prefer a more vintage touch on occasion,” Sarah says, dipping in a half-courtesy as she does.

Harry returns the courtesy, saying, “I’m sure Mitch will appreciate that appreciation.” Sarah shoots him a lewd grin at that, and he laughs, a little surprised at himself for making the joke. Maybe it's a sign that he's finally ready to stop pining over what he knows he can't have.

But Sarah starts pouting in response to his laughter. **“** Clare sure doesn’t seem to appreciate it, though,” she says, plucking at her shorts to emphasize what she means by “it”.

“Well, Clare’s not sleeping with you. She doesn’t need to appreciate it,” Harry reasons. Something lights up behind Sarah’s eyes at that, but she doesn’t respond: just starts gathering her clothes back up, a sly expression on her face.

Harry absolutely doesn’t want to know what she’s thinking. So he doesn’t ask, just finishes his own packing in comfortable silence.

Sarah texts him the next day.

 **thanks for the pep talk, turns out mitch is** **_very_ ** **into vintage too,** the message reads, followed by several winking face, eggplant, and peach emojis.

Harry stares at his phone, somehow only just now realising that he was actively helping Sarah last night. With her sex life. Her sex life with the man that Harry is infatuated with. It feels like he just unlocked a brand new level of self-sabotage. Go him.

After contemplating throwing his phone away, or banging his head into the nearest hard surface, Harry settles on the method of ‘pointedly ignoring’ and texts her back about a completely different subject. With that, the matter of Sarah’s old-fashioned lingerie is officially forgotten, and he can start (actually) moving on. No longer living in close quarters with Sarah and Mitch will help too, he hopes.

* * *

  **v. lingerie**

Without the routine of tour to rely on, time starts to swallow up the rest of the year in large gulps. Before Harry knows it, it’s October, and he’s in Tokyo, setting up some meetings for when he comes back to the city at the end of the year. He’s pleasantly surprised when, halfway through his trip, Clare calls him to say that she’s in town as well. They haven’t managed to touch base with each other in months.

They end up getting lunch at a restaurant on the ground floor of Clare’s hotel. She invites him up to her room afterwards and Harry doesn’t hesitate before accepting, grateful for both her invitation and his own lack of reluctance. He hasn’t forgotten that this time last year, they both would have avoided being alone together.

They spend the next several hours curled up on the couch in her suite’s sitting room, chatting about the developments Clare’s making with her company Majo Medicine, and Harry’s own current projects. He has to swear her to secrecy before telling her about his soon-to-be-announced co-chair position for the next Met Gala. She’s gratifyingly delighted for him.   

As seems typical lately, the time passes without him noticing. All of a sudden, it's gone dark enough outside that Clare has to get up to turn on the lights.

“You can stay over, if you like,” Clare offers when Harry tells her he should probably head back to his own hotel soon. Once the words are out of her mouth, though, she seems to second-guess herself, flushing as she clarifies,

“I mean, the couch is a pull-out. I think, anyway. I didn't mean —”

“It's all right,” Harry interrupts, before she can finish a sentence that would probably have embarrassed them both. “I have an early meeting tomorrow anyway. But thank you.”

“Right,” Clare says, looking relieved. “Well, then.”

He waits for her to say something else, but she just stands there picking at her nails. The last thing Harry wants is a return of the awkward silence of last year, so he searches his brain for a change in topic.

“Could I use your loo before I go?” he lands on eventually, and at Clare's ‘of course’, he escapes to the restroom.

After washing up, he looks around for something to dry his hands with, happening to glance at some clothes that Clare has hanging over a towel rack. Then he does a double-take, so harshly that he makes himself lightheaded.

Or maybe his sudden dizziness is from the shock of seeing the sheer blue lingerie set that Sarah showed off to him back in July. He just stands there staring at it, probably looking like a gobsmacked idiot, until Clare’s voice snaps him out of his paralysis; she’s singing lightly, back in the sitting room.

Should he tell Clare he saw it? Should he text Sarah about it? Would doing either of those things be completely inappropriate? Almost certainly. The parts of him still clinging to the fact that he was raised in polite society tell him to turn a blind eye and head home, fast. But then he hears Sarah’s voice in his head, insisting that the three of them just shared this kind of stuff now. He remembers her calling him ‘one of the girls’.  

Tour ending had also meant an end to that building sense of camaraderie — and he'd let any and all soul-searching stagnate along with it. But now he has an opportunity to return to that staring him in the face. Before he can change his mind, he grabs the lingerie from its resting place and brings it out to Clare.

She’s still singing along to a song playing from her phone, but she stops, choking on air once she notices what Harry’s holding.

“Why do you have these?” Harry asks, with all the subtlety of a heart attack. Full steam ahead at this point, he figures.

“Why do I — why do _you_ have them?” Clare demands, sounding appalled. “Those are my private —”

“They’re Sarah’s,” Harry interjects.

Clare pauses, distracted enough to drop the pinched, offended look on her face.

“How do you know that?” she asks suspiciously.

“She showed them off to me back at the Forum. Months ago. And she made a point to tell me that you weren’t impressed. So. Why do you have them now?”

Clare's phone is still playing a mellow Japanese ballad of some kind, contrasting with the way her face is growing steadily redder.

“That’s _why_ I have them,” she admits finally, stabbing the pause button on her phone and cutting the song short.“Sarah’s been sending me different sets of vintage lingerie for months now, trying to get me to try them on and admit that they’re —” Clare breaks off, looking around the room like she's hoping for some kind of emergency escape hatch to open up.

When none magically appear, she sighs, visibly steeling herself before continuing.

“Well, I’m _meant_ to be realising they’re ‘alluring and sexy’, according to her. Typical Sarah weirdness, honestly. And I mean, she and Mitch can like what they like. It just doesn’t affect me at all. But to each their own, right?”

Clare says the last bit in an airy tone of voice, clearly trying to showcase how disinterested she is. It doesn’t quite have its intended effect, considering her face is still tomato-red and her expression is shifty. It’s clear she's at least partly lying.

“You don’t look like it’s not affecting you,” Harry says, instead of letting it go like he probably should do. Because, well, what the hell; if he’s doing this, then he’s _doing it_. “And you’ve chosen to travel with this particular set, too.”

The question ‘have you tried it on yet’ hovers in the air unasked. Harry might currently be tapping into a newfound reservoir of forwardness — and he might be slowly shedding his masculinity like an ill-fitting skin — but he’d like to think he’s still a gentleman in some respects. His mother would be on the next flight to Japan to come slap him if he actually asked Clare something like that.

Clare apparently doesn’t have such reservations, because she answers his unspoken question after only a moment's hesitation.

“It’s not that I don’t find these specific knickers sexy. I just don’t find the idea of wearing _any_ kind of fancy knickers sexy. It makes me really uncomfortable, to be honest.”

It’s clearly the truth, but she’s also still clearly conflicted about something. Slowly, Harry looks down at where he’s holding the shorts against his body, and then looks up at Clare, remembering suddenly how wearing a dress in front of her (a full year ago now) hadn’t done anything to dampen her attraction to him. And he wonders. He wonders if it’s not just a matter of interest despite the dress — it might be an interest _because_ of it.

Slowly, he unfolds the shorts carefully until he’s holding them over his trousers.

“Would you be more comfortable if someone else was wearing it, then?”

Clare’s hands shoot out to grip the back of the couch, like she needs support to keep standing. Like he’s literally made her go weak at the knees just from the idea.

At her reaction, a feeling of power instantly starts coursing through Harry’s veins. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, because he’s never wanted to have that kind of sway over someone before — well, except on stage, maybe. But not in the bedroom. There, he'd always associated being assertive enough to make someone swoon with some kind of display of manliness on his part, and he’d chafed at that. It would be a farce. It would be more proof that the real him couldn’t possibly be desirable.

But actively asserting his femininity instead? Turning someone on — turning someone as beautiful and feminine as Clare on — by making himself soft, and lace-covered, and delicate?

It makes Harry feel powerful. It makes him feel connected to himself in a way beyond what he's managed to achieve in the last year.

He feels seen. He feels desired — and worthy of that desire.

He watches as Clare gathers herself. Her hands don't loosen their death grip on the couch but her blush fades and her expression settles into something more assured.

“I think I’d like that,” she says. “Maybe if. If you put it on, I’d see the appeal more.”

Harry can tell she’s being careful, still giving them both a reason for him to wear the shorts (and the _bra_ , he thinks giddily) that’s something other than ‘just the idea of it makes us blindingly aroused’.

He nods eagerly and rushes back into the bathroom, closing the door a bit too roughly behind him in his excitement. His fingers are shaking as he peels out of his clothes, blood steadily pooling in his groin as he goes. He’s already hard enough that he expects getting the shorts on to be a problem, but they slide on easily. They're tighter on him than they were on Sarah, but they're not _too_ snug **.**

He sends a mental thank you to Sarah for preferring loose-fitting bloomers over high-cut knickers.

Then he sends a mental curse her way, for liking sheer fabrics; his cock isn't exactly well-hidden. He reaches down to try to adjust himself, which quickly turns into an exercise in self-control. Even with as many lines as he and Sarah have crossed together already, jacking off while wearing her underwear would probably be going too far.

He can't make his cock disappear entirely without tucking, and he's way too hard to want to attempt that, so he rearranges things as best he can, until the head is just barely peeking out from behind some of the embroidered flowers.

Putting on the bra is more straightforward, though Harry can't help but wish it was padded, the way Clare once suggested he try. As it is, it just droops a bit sadly over his chest. But as he looks at himself in the mirror, he tries to remember how he felt just a few minutes ago: him and Clare staring each other down, excitement sparking between them.

 _She'll like it_ , he tells himself. And then, _She won't be cruel if she doesn't_.

With that in mind, he returns to the suite's main room, where Clare seemingly hasn't moved at all. But at the sight of him, she bursts into motion, coming out from behind the couch and towards Harry as if drawn in by a spell. She stops suddenly once she's right in front of him, rocking back on her heels.

She opens her mouth, but no words come out. He almost doesn’t need her to say anything; just the expression on her face makes her feelings clear. Harry knows he has a tendency to be self-conscious about this new territory he’s been slowly wading into, but it hasn’t made him _completely_ unable to read people. By this point in his life he knows what it looks like when someone’s turned on by him.

But still. He needs to know for sure.

“What do you think?” he prompts, fidgeting a little.

Clare swallows audibly.

“It looks better on you than it does on me,” she says.

The last time she’d said those words, when he was twirling around in her dress, it was in a bubbly tone of voice. He had taken it as more self-deprecating than complimentary.  But now Clare’s voice is raspy, like she has to physically force herself to speak. Now her fingers are twitching at her sides, like she wishes she was touching him right now. Now her eyes are raking up and down his body, like he’s the most —

“You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen,” Clare says, and steps forward.

Harry melts into her arms the second she reaches him. For a fleeting second he thinks about how silly his larger form must look trying to curl up into hers. Then Clare is properly holding him, arms firmly wrapped around his waist, and his self-consciousness vanishes.

He has to bend a little at the knees so that he can look up at Clare rather than down on her, but he manages it, feeling accomplished when she squeezes him even tighter.

At first, they just stand there, holding each other and swaying a bit. The moment isn't stilted as much as it is giddy, like they're both surprised and pleased at their own audacity. But even so, Harry's not sure where to go from here. He's been hard for long enough now that precome is starting to dampen the front of his shorts. He's sure Clare can feel at least his erection, if not the wetness, with how closely they're pressed together. He's not sure whether to shift the lower half of his body away from her, or maybe break away entirely and give himself some time to calm down.

Before he can make any kind of move, Clare's grip on him eases, and she moves her hands lower, so they're resting on his arse, over the shorts. After a moment, her grip tightens again. Harry's vision whites out for one glorious instant, and then her hands are gone entirely. She's moved back several steps, stammering apologies and tugging at her hair in dismay.

“Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I can't believe I just —”

“It's okay,” he says, or tries to say, but she just talks right over him.

“— basically groped you and this is clearly a fragile situation, and I should be emotionally supporting you and —”

“Clare —”

“— helping you to, um, affirm your identity, instead of just acting like a hormonal —”

Harry lunges forward and slams their lips together. For a split second, Clare's mouth works against his like she's trying to finish her sentence, but then she starts kissing back in earnest. Harry grabs her hands and moves them back behind him, a little clumsily. But she gets the idea quickly and starts feeling him up again, properly this time.  

He opens his mouth to let out a moan, and Clare deepens the kiss in response, pushing her tongue past his lips. It's messy as hell and their faces are still smashed together uncomfortably, but Harry's on cloud nine.

Without conscious thought, he starts shifting his hips, grinding his crotch forward onto her thigh and his arse back into her hands. They’re basically dry-humping like teenagers, but the gracelessness of it turns Harry on even more. The silky chiffon of the shorts doesn’t provide much protection from the denim of Clare’s jeans, and he can feel the fabric rubbing roughly against his skin. His stomach knots with arousal.

After a second, though, thinking about what he’s wearing right now makes him slow down, until he’s barely kissing Clare at all. She must sense his hesitation, because she pulls back.

“What is it?” she asks, looking concerned.

“Well,” Harry says guiltily, “I don't think this is exactly what Sarah had in mind when she sent you this outfit.”

He looks down at himself, wincing at the way his dick, still pulsing precome, has smeared and stretched the fabric of the shorts. They’re probably not unsalvageable yet, but they’ll definitely need a thorough cleaning.

Clare bites her bottom lip when she sees the state he’s in. An almost agonized look passes over her face. Harry’s sure she’s about to agree and say they should stop, or at the very least, he should change clothes. But instead —

“I can call her about it,” she volunteers.

“Right...now?” Harry asks, hesitantly.

“I’d rather not wait,” Clare says, her voice raw and breathy, and yeah, okay, he gets the urgency too.

They move back to the couch and sit down side by side. As Clare digs between the cushions for her phone, Harry finds that he has to actually sit on his hands to stop from touching her or himself.

Once Clare’s successfully recovered her phone, Harry almost stops her from making the call, because what the hell is she even going to ask Sarah? ‘Hey, just checking, is it okay if Harry wears your bloomers while he and I sleep together?’ That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

But then again, it wasn’t exactly decorous for Sarah to burst in on him at the Forum and strip down to these very same bloomers. So maybe it’ll be fine.

Clare makes the call and places it on speakerphone, so they can both wait anxiously for Sarah to pick up.

She does, eventually, greeting Clare warmly enough, but she sounds a bit out of breath. Harry and Clare look at each other, bemused. It should be mid-morning in London right now, and Sarah isn’t exactly a ‘morning run’ type of person.

“Er, is this a bad time?” Clare asks tentatively.

“No, no, you’re fine,” Sarah assures her. At the same time, Harry hears another, equally winded voice say, “I can’t fucking believe you answered the phone,” which. That’s Mitch. Harry puts the pieces together in his head: out of breath Sarah plus annoyed _and_ out of breath Mitch equals —

“Oh my god, are you two having sex right now? Why’d you bloody pick up?” Clare shouts into the phone, sounding totally horrified.

“We hadn't got that far yet, don't worry,” Sarah says. Then, talking over Clare's splutter of “I don't need details, Sarah, Jesus,” she continues with, “And considering you're actually _calling_ me, instead of just texting, I figured it might be urgent. So what's up?”

Clare shoots a helpless look at Harry, who decides that ignoring the last few seconds (and thus not thinking about the way Mitch probably looks right now) is probably his best chance at staying sane.

“Hi, Sarah, and uh, hi, Mitch,” Harry says, voice carefully neutral.

“Oh, Harry, you’re there too? Oh, that's right, you're both in Tokyo right now, aren't you?”

Sarah sounds completely blasé, like she’s content with having morning sex with her boyfriend be interrupted by a phone call.  Try as he might, Harry can’t help picturing the exasperated but quietly fond expression Mitch probably has on his face.

It makes Harry’s heart ache. And even though it’s not fair to any of them, he resents Sarah for picking up the phone. He doesn’t want the pain of witnessing this intimate version of the domesticity that he’d seen more than enough of on tour. He remembers thinking months ago that distance and time might dull his bitterness or make his interest fade. He’d clearly been kidding himself.

But he’d _also_ thought, at one point, about trying to make Mitch jealous by pursuing Clare. And now, completely independently of that admittedly petty instinct, here he is: with Clare, and with an opportunity to give that strategy a try.

He could take this chance to try to show Mitch what he missed out on. The idea’s catty as hell, but Harry’s tired of being the bigger person all the time. So before he can second-guess himself, and before Clare can work up the courage to say anything again, Harry takes it upon himself to Sarah’s question.

“We’ve been together all day, actually. We’re calling because I’m trying on something that you sent her recently, and I wanted to ask if it’s okay with you that I’m wearing it.”

There’s dead silence for at least thirty seconds. Clare goggles at him, but Harry just shrugs and mouths ‘this was the point of calling, remember?’ Just when he’s starting to get worried about the lack of response, Sarah’s voice bursts back into life, sounding hushed but delighted.

“Do you mean you’re wearing my bloomers? The blue set?”

Before Harry can reply, he hears a strangled groan over the other end of the phone.

“Everything all right?” Clare asks hesitantly, like she isn't sure she wants to know the answer.

“Well”, Sarah says, sounding surprised (but, surprisingly, still pleased), “Mitch _was_ going a bit soft while we were speaking, but now he's completely hard again, so thanks for doing my work for me, I guess.”

Clare carefully hands the phone to Harry and then buries her head in her hands.

“Um,” Harry says, but that one syllable seems to be all he can manage.

Sarah, however, seems more than happy to keep talking.

 **“** You know, you never responded to that text I sent a few months ago,” she says, playfully accusatory. “When I thanked you for your help? I assumed that was your way of saying you wanted the subject dropped forever, but I guess I was very wrong.

“How is it fitting you, then? I bet it’s snug in all the right places.”

Sarah practically drawls the last bit, voice gone dreamy like she's imagining how he must look.

Harry can't help remembering the last time she made a comment like that — about how Clare’s dress wouldn’t properly fit him. It was only a year ago. He can’t believe he was so clueless about why her words stung.

This time, Sarah doesn’t make a comment about how the fit is off because he’s not a girl. This time, she tells him, “You know, you and I aren’t all that different in size. I’m sure it's a decent fit. And if you like it well enough, we could even go to the place I bought it from. They specialize in making lingerie with a vintage touch. We could _definitely_ get something bespoke for you.”

Harry's not sure he's ever felt this combination of arousal and emotional validation before. God, the idea of him and Sarah going shopping, picking something out just for him...he can only imagine it for a second before he has to clench his thighs together, viciously squeezing his dick to try to bring himself back down to Earth long enough to respond.

“I’d like that,” he admits, reveling in the way his voice has gone high and pitchy, broadcasting how turned on he is at just the idea. “That sounds —”

He cuts himself off mid-sentence; Clare's finally lifted her head again, just to stare at him. Harry flinches at the incredulous expression on her face. God, what is he even doing? This is _so far_ from the conversation they intended to have when they called Sarah.

It was already unfair for him to use Clare in whatever (probably one-sided) mind game he's trying to play with Mitch. But just having her sit there while he, what? Flirts with Sarah in some obscure way? That would be a new low.

Instead of saying anything else, he holds Clare’s phone out towards her, so she can wrestle the conversation back into socially acceptable territory. Or so she can end the call and then throw him out of her hotel room. Harry wouldn’t blame her for doing the latter. But when she actually tries to take the phone back from him, he finds that, quite unintentionally, he's gripping the sides of it like a life preserver, hard enough that he can hear the plastic case creak ominously.

After staring at him for a moment, Clare switches tacts, running her fingers over the backs of his knuckles like she's trying to soothe a wild animal. Harry certainly feels like one, out of control and primal. His mind is spinning between processing Sarah's words, trying to interpret Mitch's _lack_ of words, and feeling ashamed that through all of this his erection hasn't gone down at all. But eventually, his grip on the phone relaxes enough for Clare to take it back from him, though his anxiety hasn't eased.

She sets it down on the coffee table in front of them and then turns back towards him, reaching out again. This time, when they clasp hands, she tugs him forward. Harry realises what she wants immediately, and all but throws himself back into her arms.

Of course, because they’re still sitting down on the couch, he’s not so much hugging Clare as he is sitting in her lap. Before he can add that to the list of things he’s panicking about right now, he hears — God — Mitch’s voice, finally contributing to the conversation.

“Are you — uh, are you still there?” He sounds as wrecked as Harry feels, but there's also a hopeful tilt to his voice, like he wants Harry to say yes. Maybe Mitch even wants him to finish responding to Sarah's question.

Harry wants to respond right away, but he makes himself look at Clare first, waiting to see where she takes them from here. He watches her inhale shakily, like she’s steeling herself for battle, but then she nods, even managing a small smile of encouragement.

“We’re still here,” Harry confirms,  “just getting a little more comfortable.” He tries to inject some coyness into his voice, but he’s been reliably informed that he’s at his least sexy when he’s _trying_ to be seductive. He cringes a little at how awkward he must sound. Sarah, at least, doesn’t seem to mind it, even letting out a speculative, possibly appreciative hum.

“Sounds relaxing. I fully approve. Mitch and I have also been having a lie-in this morning.”

“You’re having a bit more than just that, clearly,” Clare shoots back, before slamming her mouth shut, looking surprised at herself.

“Which, I mean, is fine. And none of my business,” she tacks on, her expression scrunching up like she wants to hide her face in her hands again. Harry’s glad someone else is having as hard a time with this as him.  

Sarah just laughs.

“Well, feel free to disagree with me,” she says, with more confidence than Harry and Clare combined,  “but I think it’s pretty clear by now we’re all interested in whatever _business_ is happening on both ends of this phone call.” Sarah waits for any of them to contradict her.

No one does, of course, and she continues triumphantly into the sheepish silence. “So. Back to the matter at hand. Clare, why don’t you tell me how amazing Harry looks right now? Mitch and I would really appreciate hearing more.”

Clare still has a vaguely hunted expression on her face, but Harry can tell she’s gearing up to actually do what Sarah’s asked. For one shining second, he lets himself imagine exactly how the rest of this phone call could go. Then the second passes, and he knows he can't let Clare start them down that path.

“I don't understand,” he blurts, then bites down on his tongue. God, if some off-the-cuff group call foursome is his only shot at (kind of) being with Mitch, then he shouldn't be drawing attention to how fucking weird this all is.

“What don't you understand, baby?” Sarah asks, and Harry’s so caught off-guard by the pet name he actually jerks a little in Clare’s lap. He must have accidentally bumped against some crucial real estate, because she lets out a squeak and grips him tighter.

“Mitch,” Harry makes himself say, because at least one of them needs to be a mature adult. “Do you even want to — why are you going along with this now, when we had so many opportunities in the past and — and you just ignored them?”  

He looks apologetically at Clare, but she doesn't seem surprised or resentful that he’s zeroing in on his relationship with someone else while he’s literally sitting on her.

She just smiles a little sadly at him, cupping his face with her hands and pressing a kiss to his forehead, It feels like a benediction: like she’s both lending him strength and giving him permission to continue.

“And then you and Sarah. I mean, I get it. You two are so perfect together. I’m not trying to change that." Harry could almost leave it there; he could say that whatever the four of them have just stumbled into would muddy the waters of what they all already have. He could say they ought to lay off and forget any of this happened.

But if Clare can be strong enough to let him say this, than Harry can be strong enough to actually say it.  "I just — I can’t stop thinking about. Before. How we used to be together. And until now I'd assumed that I was just making it into something it wasn't. So, um. I'm confused, I guess.”

Mitch and Sarah are both silent on the other end of the phone, for long enough that Harry suspects they've muted their speaker in order to have their own discussion. But the silence isn't long enough to prepare Harry for what Mitch says when he finally answers.

“Harry, I've been interested in you for a long time. Pretty much from the moment we met. I was just —” Mitch pauses and clears his throat. When he starts speaking again, his voice is choked with emotion.

“I was afraid, you know? I had some fucking stereotypical gay panic attack. I’d never really, I don't know. Had feelings for a guy before. At least, not in the way I knew I was starting to feel about you. And I didn’t want to fuck up the best job I'd managed to land since coming out to LA. So I just kept being afraid. And ignoring all the other things I felt. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry we never talked about it. I’m sorry I never told you.”

Harry only notices there are tears leaking from the corners of his eyes when Clare makes a distressed sound, reaching up and trying to dry his face.

Then there’s silence again, as everyone waits for Harry to get ahold of himself for long enough to respond.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” is what he eventually manages to get out, his voice thready but there. “It’s a two-way street. I could have said something too. But we’re here now, right?” he asks, trying to infuse his words with confidence instead of the desperate hopefulness he feels.

“Yeah, H. We’re here now,” Mitch says, and Harry hears his own hope reflected back in Mitch’s voice.

“And besides, Mitch,” Sarah interjects, returning to the conversation, “I’m not sure you even have to worry about a sexuality crisis, or whatever. I mean, you’re saying you have feelings for _Harry_ — it’s anyone’s guess whether that even counts as having feelings for a guy.”

The humorous tilt to her words hit Harry like a slap in the face. He physically recoils and Clare has to grab him so he doesn’t slide off her lap and tumble to the floor.

“Too soon?” Sarah guesses, after no one responds.

“It’s not a joke,” Harry says, body gone suddenly cold. “It’s not just, like for fun, it’s not — it’s not just some casual thing, it’s — I —” his throat closes up, and he can feel more tears start pricking at the corners of his eyes. They’re ones of frustration, this time, at his own inability to articulate properly.

He’s been on this earth for almost twenty-five years, and he still can’t define himself in a way that he can understand, let alone a way that he can share with other people.

He could probably keep stuttering uselessly for hours, but luckily Clare comes to his rescue, rubbing his arms soothingly until he calms down enough to finally close his mouth and focus on hearing anything other than the ringing in his ears.

Eventually, he zeroes back in on Sarah's voice. It’s gone tinny in a way that can’t be attributed just to the long-distance connection, all of her earlier confidence supplanted by genuine contrition.

“I’m sorry H, oh my god, I wasn’t trying to downplay anything about this —”

“And what is _this_?” The question tears itself out of him, leaving a burning hole in its wake. “What am I? You can’t answer that, can you? Because I’ve never told you. Because I can’t even answer it myself.”

Harry feels sick, now, like an acidic clench is twisting up his stomach in knots, and the nausea has made his cock finally go soft. He’s not sure whether to feel relieved  or depressed at that.

There’s nothing but silence from Sarah; after all her earlier posturing, she finally seems to be at a loss for what to say. God only knows if Mitch is still there with her. If Harry were in his place, he’d probably have turned tail and run by now.

“There doesn’t need to be an answer,” Clare says suddenly.

Well, _that_ feels like a blatant brush-off, but before Harry can get his hackles up about it, she continues, seemingly changing the subject entirely.

“You know, I asked you a really stupid question once, when we were first getting to know each other. I’d never worked with a musician as famous as you before, so I did some Googling out of morbid curiosity. And one of the most recent articles at the time was from some garbage tab. Mostly nonsense, obviously.

“But one part that stood out to me while reading it was you saying that you didn’t label your sexuality. Thing is, I’d always felt like that was a cop-out type of thing for someone to say. And then — do you remember what I asked you about it?”

“Yeah,” Harry replies cautiously, not sure where Clare could be going with this, other than trying to distract him with a vaguely irritating memory. “You asked if I was just saying that because I wasn’t ready to tell people that I was bi.”

Harry hears two sudden intakes of breath over the end of the phone — a mixture of surprise and disapproval — which at least confirms that Mitch and Sarah are still there, even though they apparently don’t have anything to add to the conversation.

“Yeah, I know. Not my finest moment,” Clare admits. “But you were very gracious — very _Harry_ — about it, and still took the time to explain. And it’s funny that I’m saying that, because the main thing you said was that you didn’t _want_ to ever feel like you had to explain yourself. You didn’t need a word someone else came up with to define what it meant to you to love someone.”

Clare smiles at him in wonder as she speaks; it’s the same impressed expression Harry remembers breaking over her face when they'd first had this discussion.

“So,” she asks, “why can’t you apply that to yourself? You can love this part of you — you can let us love you — without trying to find a word for it. It's okay not to know, Harry. It's okay just to be.”

It can't be that simple.

What _had_ been simple, when Harry was growing up, was acknowledging to himself that he liked both guys and girls. He knows that it can be a struggle for a lot of other people, but Harry’d been lucky with his sister and his mother.

Growing up, Gemma had let him borrow her makeup and jewelry and school uniforms, teasing him a bit but always being sure to say that he might be a weirdo, but there wasn’t anything _off_ or _wrong_ about him, and that boys could play dress-up too. It didn’t mean he was less of a boy, or gay, or whatever. _And if you do end up gay, that’s fine too,_ he remembers her adding hastily, even though he didn’t have a clue what she was on about at the time.

When he started getting old enough to date, his mother had talked to him about being safe with and respectful of his potential girlfriends. Harry, mostly to be a contrary brat, had asked if he also had to adhere to those rules with a boyfriend; she’d barely blinked before confirming that _yes, you cheeky thing, you had better be a proper gentleman to your dates no matter who they are_.

The wider world might say otherwise (and often does), but the two of them had given Harry a simple truth: there was no wrong way for him to be a man.

He’d had to let that knowledge go by the wayside for a few years — choosing to be in a boyband had meant accepting that, at least publicly, he had to be a very specific type of man. But now, he doesn't have a ‘marketability’ excuse to hide behind. Now, he feels more in control of his creative and public image than ever.

Now, he’s finally his own man again, and trying to face the idea that he might not be a man after all.

It’s a monumentally difficult thing to think, let alone say out loud. Still, while he’s been dancing around any real acknowledgment of it, he's been trying to feel out his new sense of self, even if he feels like he’s crashing and burning more often than not.

It could have been a desperate and isolating journey from the start. Instead — well, instead, he got lucky again. Three people have gone on that journey with him, and they’re the same three people waiting right now to hear how he's going to respond to Clare's encouraging words. They’ve been here the whole time, and Harry knows it isn’t for the sake of professional courtesy.

Well, Mitch has kept a professional distance about certain aspects of their relationship. But he also nodded casually and moved on, back when Harry insisted they had to scrap “Medicine,” at least for the first album; he never pushed about why Harry wasn’t ready. He nodded again just as easily when Harry told him last year, at the last minute, that he wanted to add it to the setlist for the arena tour.

Where Mitch is quietly supportive and willing to let Harry practice avoidance to his heart’s content, Sarah is brash and unrelenting about making Harry confront himself. He knows she hasn’t always had the easiest go of it in the music industry, where female drummers are few and far between. But she’s never, since Harry’s known her, compromised any of her femininity in order to meet others’ expectations. He can't count the amount of times she's shown him that he doesn't have to compromise, either.

And then there's Clare.

Clare, who’s holding him in her arms right now. Clare, who just pivoted with no hesitation from foreplay to daunting emotional honesty. Clare, who Harry knows has been attracted to him for a long time — maybe almost as long as they’ve known each other. Clare, who actually seems to become more attracted to him the more feminine he lets himself be.  

How could he ever be afraid to be honest with her? How could he imagine that Mitch or Sarah would hang up on him, or run away?

So Harry starts talking, trying to choose his words as carefully as possible.

“It’s sort of contradictory, isn’t it? For a long time, I felt like there wasn’t any point thinking about...well, about certain things that I wouldn’t be able to express anyway. And now that I've finally opened the doors, it’s like I'm obsessing over it, or trying to solve a puzzle."

"Just to clarify,” Sarah says, her ability to speak apparently restored by the chance to add some humor to the situation, "When you say 'for a long time', you mean your time with the band that shall not be named."

Harry lets out a weak giggle at that. "I don’t actually have 'One Direction' as one of my blacklisted phrases, you know," he protests half-heartedly. And then, in a more serious tone: "And I chose to go along with all of it. I basically fucked myself up for life just because when I was a teenager I listened to a couple people wringing their hands over, I don’t know. Shit like shirts that I wore being a particular shade of pink."

"They didn’t want you to wear certain things because they were afraid of what it could mean," Clare tells him. "But now you’re doing yourself that same disservice, Harry. Your head is so tangled up in what all this could mean and what you ought to think about it. And because of that, you haven't really let yourself feel it."

 _You’re doing yourself that same disservice._ The words feel like an absolution. He sobs in relief and clutches at Clare as closely as he dares. She embraces him back just as tightly, pressing kisses all along the side of his face.

"So can you tell us, Harry?" She asks, voice soft, mouth breathing hot, sweet air into his ear. "Can you tell us how you feel right now? How Sarah’s clothes are making you feel?"

Harry hesitates for a second, but they've gotten this far together, haven't they? He wouldn't be saying anything Clare hasn't already guessed.

"I feel like there’s nothing I want more in the world than for you to say that I look pretty. I know, I know, my narcissism —"

"It isn't narcissism," Clare insists immediately. "And you _are_ pretty, Harry. You always are, but especially right now. God, if you two could see him."

"I bet you look like you did that night on the beach," Mitch says unexpectedly. "You were so fucking beautiful in that dress. I could have danced with you forever."

Harry remembers the last time Mitch brought up that dress. It's funny now, how one offhand comment turned out to be the catalyst to all the changes in Harry and Clare's relationship over the last year. But at the time, it had stung, Mitch being able to casually reference a night that was anything but casual to Harry. It had been yet more proof, in Harry's book, that Mitch wasn't affected by Harry in any of the ways Harry was affected by him.

Mitch confirmed only a few minutes ago that wasn't true. He’d been making himself ignore his feelings for Harry, and he wasn't going to do that any longer. But there's a world of difference, Harry finds, between hearing Mitch make an abstract promise, and hearing that he remembers Harry looking _beautiful_.

It's beyond Harry's wildest dreams.

"Tell me more," he gasps out. "Tell me, please, I can't remember what the dress looked like."

And Mitch does just that, voice going soft with fondness as he paints them all a picture of Harry in a bright yellow dress, lighting up the beach that night like a midnight sun as Mitch twirled him around and around, the both of them stumbling in the sand, clutching each other and cackling.

Sarah and Clare press for more details, getting Mitch to describe the dress' spaghetti strap halter top, its pleated skirt, and the tiny white dots that patterned the hemline. It would be funny that Mitch is able to recall so much detail, when Harry can’t remember the dress at all. It _would_ be funny, if Harry weren’t so overwhelmed with gratitude. He’s so moved that tears start spilling out of his eyes again, although at least they’re silent ones this time. He’s able to just shake his head and give Clare a watery smile when she looks at him in concern, with Mitch and Sarah none the wiser.

“Was that okay?” Mitch asks eventually, when he’s run out of things to describe (Sarah had asked about the dress’ thread count, but they’d all just ignored her).

“God, yes. More than okay,” Harry confirms, glad that he sounds more put-together than he looks.

“ _More_ than okay, huh?” Sarah says slyly. “What does _more_ than okay mean?”

Harry and Clare give each other fondly exasperated looks. Sarah sure has a way of making sure they stay on track.

“I don’t know what you could be implying,” Harry tells her primly, hoping it’s not obvious that he’s trying to stall.

He knows she wants him to say that he’s turned on again, but he’s not. Their conversation has been a bit too much of an emotional rollercoaster for him to be there yet, even though he wants to be, at least for Clare’s sake. He has no idea how she’s handling him still sitting on her lap.

“I could be implying a lot of things,” Sarah says easily, like she knows just what Harry needs, “and I could list them if you like. It’s been a while since I’ve been with a girl, but I remember they tend to want a bit more foreplay before the main event, anyway, right?”

Just like that, Harry’s half-hard, his dick twitching and starting to tent the front of Sarah’s shorts again. They’re a little stretchier now, given how sticky and soaked they are.

It makes Harry feel a bit guilty, but it also gives him a way to answer her question while still being a bit coy. “The list isn’t necessary,” he says, “but me being ‘more than okay’ means your shorts are a lot _less_ than okay. I think they’re ruined, actually. Sorry.”  

There’s a beat of silence as Sarah processes that. And then:

“Firstly, call them what they are. ‘Bloomers’ is an underrated word, in my opinion. Secondly: don't apologise. The mental image you just gave me is going to get me through many a cold night in the future.” Her voice is all-business, but it trembles a little bit when she continues:

“I can't imagine how you're faring, Clare, considering you’re actually getting to see him.”  

Clare grins, still looking at Harry with a kind of awe that he doesn’t deserve, and her answer makes Sarah lose her composure again.

“More than just seeing; Harry’s on my lap right now, actually.”  Sarah and Mitch both let out strangled sounds at that, but Clare’s not finished. “I’ve been so turned on since he put on your clothes that at this point my knickers are probably ruined too.”

At that, Sarah actually moans, a proper sex noise, and _oh_ , Harry thinks giddily, _I didn’t ruin anything by freaking out. This is still actually happening._

“Jesus, Harry, you hear that?” Sarah pants out. “You got Clare wet just from looking at you. Just looking so far, right? And some lap-sitting, apparently.”

“Yes, we haven't — haven't really touched each other yet,” Clare admits, which Harry guesses is true, light groping and dry humping notwithstanding.

“Think maybe we should change that?” He offers, and then laughs when Clare, Sarah, and Mitch, all say ‘yes’ in unison.

With no further excuse to delay, Harry starts reaching his hands down between his and Clare’s torsos. She spreads out a bit as he does and he shifts positions accordingly so he's kneeling on the couch between her legs.

He rucks up her t-shirt above her waist and pulls down her shorts as far as their positions allow, until they're bunched up under her thighs. Then he pauses, waiting for her enthusiastic nod, before he pulls her underwear down as well — a plain white cotton set that's as soaked as she claimed.

It’s no new thing for Harry to be naked in front of Clare, but _her_ being naked in front of _him_ is uncharted waters. The first thing he notices is that she’s not shaved, and his fingers start itching immediately, wanting to feel if the loose curls of her pubic hair are as soft as they look. Before he can get his hands on her properly, though, she parts her legs a little bit more, and Harry can see where she’s pink underneath, her clit swollen and a few shades darker than the rest of her pussy.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” Harry says, hoping that she understands he’s not only repeating Mitch’s earlier words, but also everything those words made Harry feel.

They both let out a sigh once he finally touches her. Her bush is just as soft as Harry had imagined, and also thoroughly damp. Clare’s sigh deepens into a moan as he combs his hand through it, thumb skipping over her clit a few times.

That’s as far as he gets before Sarah interrupts them.

“You know, neither Mitch nor I can actually see you two. We’d appreciate a bit more narration.”

The second she finishes speaking, Mitch follows up with, “Only if you want to, though.”

“You two should go first,” Clare says before Harry can respond, and she grabs his hand to still his movements. He looks up at her in concern, but she doesn’t seem upset or like he’s done something wrong. Clearly she just has a plan of some sort, and, well, it’s not like she’s steered them wrong before. Harry sits back on his heels, putting a little bit of distance between them.

Sarah doesn’t seem to need any further convincing either. “Well, all right then," she says. "I suppose I’ll get back to what I was working on before you called.”

Mitch inhales sharply a second later, which Harry takes to mean that she must have grabbed his dick.

“As I was saying, narration is a very important aspect of phone sex,” Sarah begins, playing up her accent enough that she could be a professor at Eton or somewhere similarly posh.

It’s a bit odd, but also more than a bit sexy: this almost academic tone she’s adopted combined with the slick sounds Harry can hear as she jerks Mitch off.

“Have either of you ever gotten your hands on a circumcised dick?” Sarah asks, still casual.

Clare blushes up to the roots of her hair and shakes her head furiously, lips pressed together like she’s unwilling to give Sarah an actual answer. Harry surprises all four of them by saying,

“A couple of times.”

“Really? Jewish or American?” Sarah seems genuinely curious.

“I don’t kiss and tell,” Harry says, instead of the honest ‘both, and also neither’ because he doesn’t want to derail the conversation with questions about past partners.

“Let’s focus on Mitch’s dick instead, shall we,” he says pointedly.

“Yes, please,” Mitch grits out, voice strained.

“Oh, quit whining,” Sarah says. “It’s not like I’ve stopped wanking you off, I’m just trying to establish a baseline.” Then, clearly addressing Harry again, she continues:

“So you know how soft it feels, then, a cut dick? That the skin feels just that little bit thinner, but there’s also more friction, and you can’t slide your hand up and down _quite_ as effortlessly as you can when you’ve got foreskin to work with?”

“Um,” Harry says, “Yes? I get that you’re going for a professorial vibe right now, but a seminar isn’t actually —”

“So that means,” Sarah continues breezily, as if he hasn’t spoken, “you know exactly what I’m feeling right now. You know how Mitch’s dick feels in my hand. How it would feel in your hand.”

 _Oh_. Sarah Jones is a genius, as it turns out.

“I’ve thought about how it would feel before,” Harry admits; he hears Mitch’s breath stutter a second later, and Harry lets himself imagine that it’s partly because of that admission, and not just the way Sarah’s still clearly putting her hands to work.

Then he doesn’t have to imagine, because Mitch says, “God, me too. All the time. Whenever I see you tuning a guitar, I just — I can never stop watching your hands.”  

Harry’s flash of delight at that is snuffed out almost instantly by worry. Would Sarah get upset that Mitch just used the present tense? But it turns out that not only is she a genius, she’s also far more generous than Harry deserves, because she says, “Understandable; they’re gorgeous hands. I’d love to see them wrapped around your dick too.”

Mitch’s breathing is even more labored after that, like he’s getting closer to coming because of the mental picture Sarah is painting them all — not just of the current scene, but a potential future one, too. One where it’s Harry’s hand on him, this time.

Half of Harry wants to say something else, so he can be responsible for working Mitch up even more; the other half is waiting with bated breath for whatever wonderful thing Sarah will say next. But it ends up being Clare that has the magic words. Her eyes and voice are both glassy with arousal as she says, “I bet it would look especially pretty if his nails were painted again.”

In the past, on the rare occasions Harry had let himself fantasise about what Mitch sounded like when he came, he had imagined a contained exhale of breath, in line with the quietly reserved energy Mitch brought to the stage most nights on tour. But Mitch starts making _noises_ after Clare’s pronouncement, louder and more drawn out than his previous moans.

Harry makes a silent vow to start wearing nail varnish as often as he can.

They’re all quiet for a minute afterward, giving Mitch a chance to recover from his post-orgasm haze. But it’s not long before Sarah, their ever-reliable playmaker, gets things back in motion.

“All right, then — your turn again,” she says playfully.

“Right,” Harry says. Ridiculously, he can feel his competitive streak rear its head as he eyes Clare, wracking his brains for a way to one-up Sarah’s performance, like they’re back on opposite sides of a ping-pong table.

“Right,” Sarah echoes, gently mocking. “Are you going to tell us what you were doing earlier that had Clare making those sounds?”

“No, he’s not,” Clare says, a determined glint in her eye. “I’m going to make him come first.”

Harry raises his eyebrows. He knew Clare had some kind of plan in mind when she stopped him earlier, of course. But he can’t help feeling like it’d be inconsiderate, somehow, to focus on his pleasure before hers.

“Are you sure? I mean, I usually —” Harry cuts himself off, blushing.

“You're always a gentleman, I'm sure,” Clare says. “But I think, tonight, it’s ladies first.” She raises her eyebrows and Harry blushes even more.

“But you’re a lady —” he almost pauses here, but he makes himself say the last bit “— too. Not just me.”

“But I’m not all decked out for the occasion like you,” Clare says, running a hand over his bra, just barely brushing a nipple. Harry shudders. “Maybe I want to show you how much I appreciate it.”

Well, if she’s going to put it like that, Harry’s not going to argue.

The next few seconds are confusing, then, because Clare reaches back down between them, letting out soft sounds as she slides first one, then two fingers inside herself. He's not exactly complaining about her apparently changing her mind about which of them is coming first; it's arousing just watching her hand get steadily wetter. Before he can start filling Sarah and Mitch in on what they're missing, though, Clare stops, dragging her now-glistening fingers against her clit one last time before stilling her hand.

“Do you trust me?” she asks, a little playful but mostly earnest.

“Of course,” Harry says, because she's got him this far.

She smiles, pleased at his answer, and reaches out with her mostly dry hand to start untying the little ribbon at the front of his shorts (‘bloomers’, Sarah’s voice in his head corrects him), before tugging them down his hips.

“Could you turn around a bit?” Clare asks, following up with, “Keep sitting in my lap though!” when he tries to get up. After a second, he's resituated, his back pressed against her breasts and his now bare arse resting against the tops of her thighs.

Clare’s left hand settles into a firm grip on his waist, and her right hand — Harry nearly bites through his tongue. The fingers of her right hand — her wet hand — are drawing a line down the cleft of his arse.

“Yeah?” Clare asks.

“Yes,” Harry confirms, a syllable that’s more a breathy sigh than a comprehensible word. She must understand, though, because instantly he feels a blunt pressure at his hole: two of her fingers pressing in, and in, until they can’t go further. Clare pauses for a second, and Harry takes a moment just to relish the fullness that he feels; it’s been a bit since he’s had anything other than his own fingers inside himself.

He must take a beat too long to adjust for Sarah’s liking, because she clears her throat pointedly, obviously angling for more ‘narration’. Clare rolls her eyes, but then a grin steals over her face; it’s the closest to devious that he’s ever seen her look.

“So Sarah,” Clare says, still keeping her fingers unmoving inside him, “Remember when you made fun of me for always having my nails cut short?”

“Yes,” Sarah says, sounding out the one syllable slowly like she’s searching for the trap in Clare’s question.

“Turns out it’s more than just a sound business choice as a pianist. If my nails were too long, I wouldn’t be able to have my fingers in Harry right now.”

“Oh my fucking god,” Mitch says, sounding as turned on as he did when Sarah was jerking him off. Harry’s face floods with colour again. He doesn’t know how he’s managing to blush when it feels like every ounce of blood in his body is pooling in his groin.

“Well, that’s. Certainly an update. Thank you,” Sarah says, voice faint.

“You’re welcome,” Clare says sunnily, and then, finally, she starts moving her fingers.

Her movements are a little stilted, like this is new territory for her. Harry wants to say something reassuring — to tell her that it feels good, because by _god_ it does — but then he notices the little squelching sounds her fingers are making as they slide in and out of his hole and suddenly he vividly recalls where Clare’s hand was, just a moment ago.

He's wet inside now. Like she is, and like Sarah must be. Slick, but not from lube. Slick the same way most girls are.

If someone got their tongue up in him right now, what would they taste? Would he taste even a little bit like the girls he's eaten out before?

“Clare,” he says suddenly, wildly, before he’s even finished the thought, “Will you say — will you tell Mitch and Sarah what you’re —”

“God, I wish you two were here to feel him,” Clare blurts out, no hesitation, like she was waiting for his say-so. “He’s so tight and — hot, inside. The way he’s squeezing around my fingers. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

And that’s good, it’s _so good_ , but it’s not quite what he was angling for. Before he can make himself admit that, though, Sarah speaks again, because Sarah always knows what to add, doesn’t she? She can always figure out how to get them all that extra step over the line.

“Already at two fingers, huh?” she asks. “Or maybe you even started with two. Good to know your pussy is so ready for it, Harry.”

There it is. Harry lights up inside, squirming on Clare’s fingers even more. The noise that comes out of his mouth must sound as desperate as he feels, because Sarah keeps going immediately, steady and assured.

“Yeah? Bet you’re taking Clare’s fingers so good. Your pussy knows exactly what it was made for. You know exactly what you were made for.”

Harry couldn’t manage a response if he tried. It’s far from the first time he’s been fucked like this, but he’s never felt this pinned open during sex before, like every bit of him, inside and out, is being seen for the first time. It’s _more,_ somehow, and even though Clare’s fingers are fairly small, and even though she hasn’t managed to hit his prostate, and even though she hasn’t touched his dick at all, Harry knows he’s close to coming already. He doesn’t want to give in just yet, though. He wants this new feeling to last for as long as possible. He tries to steady his breathing.

“How many fingers are you up to, Clare?” Sarah asks a few moments later.

“Still just two,” Clare says, punctuating her words with a little twist of said fingers, drawing another gasp out of Harry.

It’s all right. He’s not going to come just yet. He wants this new feeling to last for as long as possible.

“Well,” Sarah says, her voice loud like she's pressed her mouth right up against the mic of her phone, “You’d better add a third finger — and Harry, make sure the next few times you finger yourself, that you get up to at least three fingers as well.”

He won’t come yet. Not just yet. He wants it to last as long as —

“Because you need to be well sorted out when Mitch and I next visit you in the studio. The first thing I'm going to have him do is bend you over a recording console and fuck you.”

Harry seizes up and starts coming, just like that, smearing and probably staining the inside of Sarah’s bloomers beyond repair.

He can feel himself clenching around Clare’s fingers. He can hear himself making sounds: completely involuntary, barely human noises. But even though it’s probably the most intense orgasm he’s ever had, there’s a thin layer of despair on top of it all. What happens, once this moment ends?

Maybe he’ll never get this feeling back. Maybe, even after everything that’s been said, they’ll go back to thinking it’s just a laugh (or worse, some solely sexual thing), the way Harry needs them to treat him like a girl, sometimes. Maybe —

“I can’t wait to watch you fall apart in person,” Mitch says, unknowingly knocking Harry’s spiral off its downward trajectory, “if you give me the chance to see it. And all the other things Sarah’s talked about — the clothes that she and you and Clare have been sharing. I can’t wait to see all of that too.”

“You’ve already seen a bit of it,” Clare says, gently pulling her fingers out of Harry. “You helped me with the socks, remember?”

“Ooh, I forgot about that one,” Sarah says. “The girl socks in Glasgow. That could be a film title, really. I think it’s the alliteration. Gives it a cinematic feel.”

God, Harry’s being fucking stupid. This feeling isn’t going to fade. It’s stayed steady even when he couldn’t remember that night in Cocosan and had to guess its source. It turns out he was right; it’s gratitude after all — the soul-deep kind that can only come from being understood, right when it’s needed most.

Harry turns himself back around, slides off the couch, and goes to his knees in a single burst of movement. Then he buries his head between Clare's legs. He tries to put all the things he still can't quite say into the strokes of his tongue against her clit.  

From the similar sounds he can hear Sarah making every time he comes up for air, Mitch had the same idea as him for how to return the favor.

He likes the thought that their mouths are working in unison, even on different continents. He imagines that he can taste Sarah too, and that Mitch can taste Clare. It’s the closest they’ve come to kissing each other, so far. But Harry knows they will eventually.

He knows, now, that there isn’t a limit to what Clare and Sarah will share with him. He doesn’t have to worry about hitting some unseen wall, where they’ll decide that what he wants is too much. He doesn’t have to feel guilty that he’s invading some space — some abstract divine womanhood that will forever be beyond his reach.

What he _does_ feel is lucky: to have the chance to make Clare shake apart around him, to hear Mitch ensuring that Sarah is well on her way to doing the same, and to have the promise of more in the near future.  

In fact, in this moment, Harry might just be the luckiest girl in the world.


End file.
